Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Dinosaurs may be extinct from the face of the planet, but they are alive and well in our imaginations.
Basically, as everybody that has had a taste of the record business knows, they are gangsters and crooks.
I never considered myself like a pop musician or rock star, because that didn't really exist when I started.
What the hell is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and what does it do besides talk about itself and sell postcards?
My advice to new artists is to forget about all of this and take acting and dancing lessons and become a video star.
I love the sound of vinyl best. My sweetheart and I love to put on a vinyl record, it feels and sounds so much better.
In some states, the population is pretty low and if 5,000 kids vote, they could completely change the political atmosphere.
Hip-hop belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's one of the most radical, revolutionary and reactionary music there is.
I was exposed to jazz and blues and gospel and country music and rock, and I was the only kid I knew who knew about that stuff.
Looking at Capitol's performance over a 22-year period, I figure they were focused three years out of the 22 I worked for them.
I kind of enjoyed having people complain that I wasn't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame more than I think I'll like being in it.
The digital world is so convenient and nice, but just playing back a vinyl record is a much warmer, hotter, more present feeling.
It'd be really great to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame mature. It's a good facility there in Cleveland. I like the museum a lot.
If there were 3,000 people in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the musical education would be so much better than this little elite thing.
I think the audiences abroad are older and come from a more mature society. They have a different understanding of whats happening as art.
The people at Jazz at Lincoln Center are an amazing group and have done a phenomenal job teaching kids and audiences of all ages about jazz.
I can walk into Tower Records, go get my box set, take out my Steve Miller credit card, and the clerk will look at me and go, 'Thanks, next.'
I really enjoy working with luthiers, and have a couple of really old Les Pauls and one of my original Strats that I still carry on the road.
I met Les Paul when I was about 5. I was taken to see him perform and the place was sold out, just packed and full of really great musicians.
Growing up, I was always around adult musicians who played for their entire lives. So that's what I wanted to do, and I always had that in mind.
We have screwed with our environment. We have a culture that's going crazy, and it's all being propelled by the trillion-dollar advertising corporations.
The truth of the matter is, things that feel spontaneous have a much longer life than things that have got a lot of burnt brain tissue to make them perfect.
If folks really want music in their community they can do it very cheaply. It doesn't have to be a $50 million program. All we need is just a little real estate.
With the search for the Higgs, we're involved with 5% of the visual universe, and now we have 95% of the invisible universe that's coming into view. That's amazing.
My roots are in everything from doo-wop and blues to the Four Freshman and the Beach Boys and jazz and electronica. But it was put together in a deceptively simple package.
For guitar players especially, blues is the foundation of rock and roll. You take country music and rock and roll and jazz and you mix it together, and that's my basic makeup.
I love performing, and connecting with an audience never gets old for me, but it does get old for me when my audience is just only interested in something they've already heard.
I've always considered myself a serious guitar player, but I haven't been really worried about whether the public thought I was. That never was part of my record sales strategy.
I've demanded respect for myself and my band and my peers, I've demanded full artistic control for my music, I advocate for artists and music education wherever I can. And I'm a nice guy.
Growing up in Dallas, my first influences on the guitar were T-Bone Walker and Les Paul. T-Bone taught me how to play lead guitar behind my head and do the splits in 1951 when I was nine.
I was born into a household where my aunt, grandmother and mother lived their music. They all sang harmony, and by the time I was 2, I could sing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' in three-part harmony.
When Chuck Berry came along, what he did was more rock & roll than it was blues. It was more exciting. He was like the next step. I thought his first single, 'Maybellene,' was the greatest song in the world.
I'm sort of standing on T-Bone Walker's shoulders, Les Paul's shoulders, Lightnin' Hopkins' shoulders, Muddy Waters' shoulders, you know? And if I've inspired other people, I'm pleased. That pleases me greatly.
From the minute I became aware of Jimmie Vaughan and his playing, he was one of my very favorites. So I made it my business to meet him and become friends with him - to work with him and record some of his material.
There aren't that many people that cover my music. It's kind of hard to cover. Everybody always has their own spin. The only guy who didn't, I think, was Seal. It just sounded like a bad version of 'Fly Like an Eagle.'
Vinyl's like a really juicy steak compared to like a kind of tough steak or something. It's really good. And once you listen to vinyl and get a chance to hear it, I think anyone will enjoy it more than they will digital.
Dealing with Jazz at Lincoln Center and its board of directors, who are so great, and then seeing how these Rock Hall guys operate, it's like: 'Really?' It seems like they're total amateurs when it comes to doing shows and contracts.
My furniture, boxes, and turnings are simple, practical designs for everyday use. I love the grain and beauty of wood. Each piece of lumber is a work of art, after all, and I'd like to honor that gift and pass it on for someone else to appreciate.
As soon as I understood what was going on in San Francisco, which was in 1965 and '66, I immediately left Chicago where I was working in a nightclub that was being shaken down by the mafia and the police for payments. I mean, it was a real thug world.
Generally what you see happen is these talented kids make a great album, but they don't have a chance unless they have someone working with them who has integrity. They get thrown out by MTV and radio in six weeks, and they don't get any time to grow.
From a small child to right now - I mean, when I was five years old, Red Norville, Tal Farlow, Charles Mingus, Les Paul, Mary Ford, people like that were coming over to my house. So I was around professional adult mature musicians who had had big careers.
I was living and working with adult men who were playing a real art form. And I had been playing blues all my life. As soon as I formed my first band, we played Jimmy Reed stuff. So it wasn't like I was a white kid who was learning the blues from B.B. King records.
Is there one blues guy who was the most sophisticated and influential, like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong in jazz? Was it Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, or all of them? I think you have to pick all of them.
When I was a kid, I never thought I would ever be able to make records and never really thought seriously about a musical career because a musical career was being Fabian or Frankie Avalon or something. It didn't make any sense. There wasn't any possibility to get into that world.
You know, songs like 'Rock'n Me' were actually written to be played in large... for a hundred thousand people kind of gatherings. And a lot of what came out on 'Fly Like an Eagle' and 'Book of Dreams' was music that was put together to be played in big, big venues with big light shows.
I want to entertain my audience. I know when then come and see me play, if I don't do 'Swing Town,' 'Jet Airliner,' 'Take the Money and Run,' 'True Fine Love,' 'Fly Like an Eagle,' 'The Joker,' blah blah blah - if I don't do all those songs, they'll be extremely disappointed. I love to do them.
We'll go out and we'll be playing in front of 15,000 people and say, 'Hey, we're going to do three new songs from something we just recorded' and 5,000 people get up and go get a hot dog and a beer and they don't come back until they hear the opening strings of 'The Joker' or 'Fly Like an Eagle.'
Rock 'n' roll guitar came from blues guitar. It was the blues guys who first turned the amp up and started whacking on the Stratocaster and a Les Paul. It wasn't the country guys and it wasn't the white guys; it was the Blues guys. That's where the real fire is in all of this rock and roll music.
The audience wants to hear 'Rock n' Me,' 'Space Cowboy,' 'Living in the U.S.A.' When you start to play something else, you can feel the interest and enthusiasm go; the steam goes out of room. They are really 'Greatest Hits' fans and that's what they want to hear. It's disappointing that it's this way in the U.S.
Technology and the Internet have created a new set of relationships. It's changed the social fabric of promotion: advertising, dating. Part of art world judgment, part of it, is based on people's statistics; their measure of financial value: of likes, of popularity. Data and technology are invading the traditional and classic set of criteria.